On day one of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it broke my heart to think of the family members who sat in fearful anticipation of what might have happened to their loved ones who work on rigs. My heart ached too for our gulf and the fertile yet fragile ecosystem of our coastline.

It never occurred to me to hate the oil company or to hate offshore drilling. The rigs have been out there in the gulf my entire life. They've become reef systems for every type of aquatic life you can imagine. Part of fishing as a child meant heading out to the rigs. The inland rigs meant redfish and trout, and that meant court bouillon and almondine. A little farther out it was lemon fish, grouper, and amberjack, fish for the grill. Yet farther out and it was tuna, bull dolphin, wahoo, and other powerful fish it took considerable means to fish for, both in money and equipment. We had neither, so those trips depended upon an invite.

The rigs also meant salvation when the boat motor went out or when a massive thunderstorm would blow in and trap you offshore. Never did I question drilling or oil in general, in part because it was the livelihood of most of the men in the neighborhood, who worked offshore as divers, helicopter pilots, and various mid-level management types.

We also lived with shrimpers, fishers, and crabbers. I grew up shrimping with very small trawls that I'd pull around the lake with my 15-foot skiff. Every now and then I'd get work as a hand on a large trawler, 65 feet or so. In between drags, after we sorted and picked the shrimp from the other 500 species of critters that would be swept up in the nets, we'd boil shrimp in a big pot on a big propane burner. I can still taste those shrimp today—the best I've ever had, boiled by men who took great pride in what they cooked. Often they would add a few drops of Meyer lemon oil, which gave the shrimp an exotic lemongrass flavor.

I gave the propane burner and tank no more thought than as a means of portable cooking. And the old island's "Captain Manny" probably didn't think he was setting a trend by using sustainably grown lemon oil in his boil—it was what he had at his fingertips, grown from his land in lower St. Bernard parish. Propane burners are a way of life in southeast Louisiana, to such a degree that we just plain call them "crawfish pots and burners." Everyone has one, and the name denotes the most popular spring activity in these parts.

Years later, after Hurricane Katrina, it was the crawfish pot and the marshaling of resources like propane tanks, red beans, black beans, lima beans, pinto beans, and rice that saved my business and gave others hope at a time we'd lost it all. When there was no other means but fire—and even the available wood supply was too wet for any sort of reliable cooking fuel—those tanks made it possible for Alon Shaya, a homeless Israeli chef; Blake LeMaire, a former Marine Corps comrade; and me to cook. Alon and I made whatever beans we could get our hands on, and paired them with rice to serve out of Blake LeMaire's flatboat in Igloo ice chests. We fed people until there were no more people to feed: many of the people who lived where we were cooking had been moved to shelters outside the affected area.

After that, our crawfish pots were used to feed hundreds of workers rushed in to "turn around" our many oil refineries, which flank the banks of the Mississippi. And yes, we were all too happy to charge the oil companies for our services—not because we hated "them" but because it was a means to our survival. I never thought about drawing a correlation between the propane burners and the downed, and in some cases oil-flooded, refineries. In my mind we were doing what we could with what we had to feed folks and to employ people who had many others depending upon them to live. I believe God gave me a talent to cook, and I used that talent to do my part in providing for my family and the 120 employees I was responsible for. Today we have roughly 500 employees, and I've got six partners—one of whom is the former Marine friend, and another the homeless Israeli chef.

Nearly five years after the storm, I was asked by a propane council to be a spokesperson for safe grilling, emphasizing the dos and don'ts of grilling with propane. They paid me for my time, and I gladly took their money. You see, I'm a businessperson. In particular, we chefs buy all sorts of tasty goods, cook them, and sell them for a profit. It's how I'm able to sustain a beautiful life for my wife and four boys. The propane folks who paid me still have no clue that I even have an honest affinity for propane.

Getting back to the Deepwater Horizon/British Petroleum debacle. I was truly sickened by the lack of response, and wrote an op-ed about my feelings in the Atlantic Food Channel. I've never thought of myself as an anti-anything person, but I am pro-responsibility—something I'm trying to pass on to my four young lads. For instance, if you drop something, then pick it up. If it's beyond my boys' realm to pick it up, then as their father I should have been paying much closer attention. And if the mess my boys made affects my neighbors, it seems logical that I take responsibility and figure out how to mitigate the damages or effects on my neighbor. This is simple stuff. If I spend my energy questioning my boys about whose fault it was, of course they will all point to one another saying, "It wasn't me, Dad" or "It was so-and-so's fault."

So with BP. Those of us here are left with a seemingly insurmountable mess, with the richest wetlands of America and a culture to match hanging in the balance. Whoever is looking to assign blame—even to me, for taking money for promoting propane—is overlooking the plight of those fish, birds, and people who depend upon the salt marsh estuaries that give the Gulf of Mexico and much of America life. Our wetlands and culture are at stake! Now let us see what we are going to do about it.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.